When it comes to the art scene, Miami is still a baby sucking on its mother's teat. Helping nurture it to rapid adulthood, however, is Haitian artist and tropical culture buff Edouard Duval-Carrié. The 59-year-old's newest body of work, "Imagined Landscapes," is now showing at Pérez Art Museum Miami.

"This show is such a knockout," says the director of the museum, Thom Collins.

But long before his 11 large-scale paintings hung on the walls and two chandelier sculptures oscillated from the ceilings of the PAMM expanse, Duval-Carrié had been around the explosive art boom of Basel. He, alongside pictorial greats -- such as José Bedia -- has helped father the community by reinstating historic classics through a cultured modernity.

Though his strong fondness for the Sugar Islands of the Caribbean innately defines his stylistic reputation, Duval-Carrié's newest paintings feature darker hues and glittering surfaces, evoking a sense of mysticism in these tapestry-size giants.

"I decided to create a whole new body of work using glitter because nobody has the nerve to paint with glitter glue," the artist says.

Composition and technique aren't the only factors that set the tone of the grandiose exhibition. Location was everything. The artist elected the massive space to properly depict his message of social and political oppression throughout the Caribbean during the 19th Century.

"There were all these questions in my head, and what finally dictated what would happen in this room was the scale of it," he says. "To look at a body of depth that would fill this room in an intelligent way -- it's a very site-specific group of work."